If a problem can be solved without AI, does AI actually make it better?

I recently had an interesting conversation with an investor. I was explaining a very concrete technical problem and the solution behind it. At some point he asked: “Won’t AI solve this in a few years? If so, doesn’t that make your solution irrelevant?” That question stuck with me — because my instinctive reaction was: why would that make it irrelevant?

If a problem can be solved without AI, that solution is always:

• faster

• cheaper - or zero cost

• deterministic

• easier to reason about

• easier to trust

In other words, it has fewer moving parts. Using AI to solve a deterministic problem feels a bit like using ChatGPT as a calculator. Yes, it can tell you that 2 + 2 = 4. But the calculator still wins — every time.

I’m starting to think that the real winners won’t be “AI-powered everything”, but systems where AI is used only where the problem is actually probabilistic or ambiguous.

So I’m curious how others see this: Do non-AI solutions become less valuable just because AI could solve the same problem? Or do simple, deterministic solutions actually become more important in an AI-heavy world?